I am embarassed to say that I read *Battlefield Earth * by L. Ron Hubbard twice. I was at my grandparent’s house for the summer; they lived in rual Louisiana. Over the weeks, I read everything in the house except this book (no idea how it got there) and The Book of Mormon.
I have also read Meg by Steve Alten. The back cover suckered me in - it sound like a good story. Awful, horrible, wretched bunch of text. I can’t bring myself to call it a book.
I’m always torn about this. It was either Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, or Thomas Harris’ Hannibal. I just don’t grok Heinlein, so I’ll guess I’ll go with that one, since I actually wanted to finish Hannibal. (Until I did, and then I was pissed off for days.)
gasp I’ve read that!! I figured I was the only one. I bought it because it amused my friend Meg to see it on my bookshelf. I don’t remember much of it, but I remember thinking “Whew, never reading that again.”
Geralds Game by Stephen King. It looked like it would be good, I mean the cover picture was a headboard with handcuffs attatched.
It was the MOST BORING book I’ve ever read. After the first 60 or so pages I flipped ahead to see if it would get better. Around the 200 page mark I found that…
The woman was still laying there handcuffed to the bed, her husband dead on the floor. Various descriptions of the wind blowing, the grass rustling, dogs barking…
Good thing it was a library book or I would have wanted my money back.
Yah, Meg was pretty bad. Nothing compared to “Atlas Shrugged”, though. “Meg” was just stupid. “Atlas Shrugged” was stupid, and mean-spirited, and pretentious as hell. And it had a forty-page monologue on the evils of helping people. I read it in high school because I thought it was something educated people should read - I think it made me stupider.
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova – a rambling mess, unbelievable coincidences, repetitive, trite dialogue, etc. She made Dracula boring. Neat trick.
When I was twelve, I [del]was trapped in an RV[/del] went on vacation with my parents and my 3 siblings. For a month. The only thing to read was a big box of romance novels and used books. The worst of the lot was **Unknown but Known ** by Arthur Ford, the “medium”. Even at 12 I could tell it was nothing but a bunch of hooey. And badly written hooey at that!
Really? Note to self: Just take it out of the To-Be-Read pile and put it right into the Used-Bookstore-Fodder pile. Tell Mom you read it so she doesn’t feel bad.
When looking it up for the link, I was shocked to see that there were sequeals! What god or demon let this guy continue the story? ::shudder::
A book titled “A Matter of Time” by, well, I can’t remember. It was a bout time travel and from the way it read I suspected the author wrote each chapter and put them in random order before publication. It remains the only book I ever failed to complete once I started.
Marc
I must say, I have no patience for bad books. I have no compunction tossing a book aside half-read if it fails to enthrall me.
Life’s too short.
I spent some time in the book club from hell. Where the members had absolutely no taste in books, would tend to pick books out based on the length (and they always went for the shortest thing possible), and then most didn’t bother to read the nightmare they foisted on the group anyway.
Still, the worst book out of a large collection of awful books was “Autumn Leaves” by Victor McGlothin. Here’s the first page, from Amazon. Sadly, that’s some of the better writing in the book.
It’s worse than “Left Behind,” which I also had the misfortune to read.
I have The Historian waiting for me at the library… now what do I do?
“The Last of the Mohicans”. One of those books that I thought I should read just because it was a classic. When the cashier at Borders told me it was the worst book she had ever read, I should have listened to her and told her to void the sale right then. The writing is just… unreadable. I would have to read sentences two or three times just to figure out the sentence structure. Probably one of the few times where the movie is actually better than the book.
I’ve got a few bad books under my belt, but hands down the worst was The Celestine Prophesy.
Oh, I forgot the “why” part of the OP.
The book was so ridiculous, yet took itself so seriously. And then there was some sort of form at the end where you could send the author $25 bucks or something that would enable you access to more of his “insights.”
A colleague of mine had it with her on a research trip we were on and she was laughing at how bad it was. I read it on a lark, and we basically MST3K’d it for a couple of days. (“Oh, I’m vibrating into another plane!”).
The Quest for the Faradawn (Hardcover) by Richard Ford
Wince worthy. One of the only books I have ever just gotten rid of. I don’t remember if I actually threw it away or if I traded it in at the used book store.
<shudder> Thanks for reminding me. Now I have to bang my head against the wall until I forget about it again.
The Ultimatum to Mankind by Zeev Dickman. The most excruciating hundred pages I’ve ever read. This was self-published as porported “science fiction” “story” where an alien gave an ultimatum to mankind.
Or, rather, to one person – a barely disguised duplicate of the author. Among the many stupidities:
The language is stilted and boring, and we go through 80 pages of dull exposition (repeating each point at least three times) before we even get to the ultimatum.
It was clearly a self published book. I wouldn’t have read it, except that I volunteered to review it for Tangent. I managed to write a review that didn’t have a single conceivable positive quote, even out of context.
Besides the trashy fiction I read from time to time, and sticking to “real” literature, I would have to say Frankenstein. Of course the story was fun but it bugged me that it was told from a variety of perspectives and they all had the same tone.
Off the top of my head I recalling reading a Sci-Fi book as a child called “Space God” I was (am) such an avid reader I will usually read through anything, clinging to the hope that it will improve. I barely made it through 2 chapters. Complete trash. I don’t even know who’s shrivled brain shat that tripe out.
Oops, I forget the why as well.
The shame about this book is that it is actually pretty well written. The story however comes across like it was written by an emo boy immediately after sitting through a PETA lecture. It starts out OK and if the author had taken the “innocent teaches the wise” route then it may have ended well. Instead the innocent presses the reset button on reality and makes the whole world all shiny and bright again. Then right at the end, right when you think you have made it through the worst, it is revealed that the old narrator of the story is in fact the little innocent all growed up and he is telling his story as a cautionary tale to the next generation. :smack: